We were recently introduced to our next brief, the task seems to be fairly straightforward, however, the different ways of going about it will be interesting. We will be put into a group of 3 in order to produce a website which uses database through the use of php and sql.

In our first lecture Rob introduced us to some of his favourite open source softwares as well as wikimedia and its benefits. A wiki is a web application which is ideal for collaborative modification and is a type of content management system. Rob suggested we add a wiki to our dakar domains in order to help us collaborate and share ideas with our fellow group members. As well as this he suggested we create a github account in order to easily backup and make changes to our code as a group.

To explore the nature of wikis and participatory culture further we were set a homework task of contributing to a user generated content platform. I decided to look on open street maps and see what had been and needed to be added to the university location.

This was my first time working with a UGC platform. I never realised how easy it would be to work with. They are a useful resource due to its communal nature and rather than waiting for a moderator to update the maps you can do it yourself. I look forward to researching further into UGC and hope to explore wiki commons in the near future as well as creating my own wiki for our group task.